Impaired vowel discrimination in Mandarin-speaking congenital amusics

Abstract

This paper investigates if individuals with amusia show deficits in the identification and discrimination of Mandarin vowels, with the aim of exploring whether the deficiency of the amusics lies in the acoustic processing of frequency, or in pitch processing. The results showed that the amusics performed comparably as the controls in vowel identification. For discrimination, both groups exhibited better discrimination for between-category pairs than within-category pairs, indicating that the amusics are not impaired in the categorical perception of vowels. However, amusics exhibited poorer accuracy than the controls in vowel discrimination across the board, irrespective of between- or within-category vowel pairs. Moreover, the participants’ vowel discrimination accuracy is significantly correlated to their musical ability, as indexed by the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA) scores. The results suggest that individuals with congenital amusia might be impaired in frequency processing in general, a deficiency broader than originally believed.